[BlindMath] New to LaTex

Tue Sep 26 16:28:39 UTC 2023

Hello,
Thank you for the elaborate explanation.
I haven't previously heard of the other tools you have mentioned, but all of these sound very interesting to explore.
I also never knew you could accessible draw figures/diagrams using these programmed tools; I'm familiar with graphing calculators such as Desmos.
Thank you for your insights.
Best,
Dana

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Rastislav Kish via BlindMath
Sent: Monday, September 25, 2023 7:06 AM
To: blindmath at nfbnet.org
Cc: Rastislav Kish <rastislav.kish at protonmail.com>
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] New to LaTex

Hi,

LaTeX is a typesetting system. You write a document using a plain-text language, and get a stylyzed output according to what you've coded. And yes, math content is supporrted.

It's a widely used tool in the academic writing, so if you want to learn more and try it out, there are tons of books, tutorials and other resources for doing so.

Regarding personal and subjective experience, personally, I absolutely hate LaTeX. Yes, it was a big thing back in the 20th century (TeX was released in 1978). But, for some context, this was the era when it was common for people to write computer programs in machine code, C programming language was a fresh novelty, and printing a document was among the computers' top capabilities.

In these wild conditions, yes, LaTeX truly was an outstanding and exceptional, visionary project.

However, 40 years have passed, in computer science, that's an eternity. 
Everything has so much drastically evolved - computers, cpus, 
programming languages, paradigms, backing technologies, just... everything.

Therefore, for the eye of a modern computer user/developer, LaTeX is a 
very messy, ugly, awkward, inconvenient language that just doesn't fit 
into the set of modern shiny advanced tools we have and are used to today.

However, given all the development laTeX received due to its enormous 
popularity, it has been a very difficult task to create a full-fledged 
modern competitor that could challenge everything LaTeX can offer.

But, there are definitely very interesting projects, with interesting 
results.

My favourite is Typst:

https://typst.app/

The syntax is just beautiful, compiler is blazingly fast, the used tech 
stack very modern and generally, I love it.

And, there are other tools, depending on one's particular use-case. If 
you're not after typesetting but just formatting, Markdown is becoming 
more and more popular in science and particularly the data science, 
often combined with code blocks in various programming languages (see 
RMarkdown, Jupyter notebooks etc.)

Asciimath is great for very readable math notation, there are plenty of 
diagraming tools like d2 or plantuml, and, if there's a need to join the 
toolchain together, there are preprocessors available that can do the work.

So, there is myriad of tools these days. I'm always trying to pick up 
the nicest and most convenient-ones to get the job done.

Best regards

Rastislav

Dňa 21. 9. 2023 o 23:37 Dana Ibrahim via BlindMath napísal(a):
> Hello all,
>
> I hope everyone is doing great.
>
> I recently heard about the concept of LaTex, but I want to learn more about
> it.
>  From what I've heard, you can type math symbols using letters. For example,
> typing a fraction would mean that one would type "frac."
>
> I also heard that one can compile these LaTex files into a PDF file, but I
> also know that math PDFs are terrible with screen-readers.
>
> So, what are your experiences with LaTex? How do you read it? What are the
> most accessible applications one can use?
>
> Sorry for the long email.
>
> Best,
> Dana
>
> _______________________________________________
> BlindMath mailing list
> BlindMath at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for BlindMath:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/rastislav.kish%40protonmail.com
> BlindMath Gems can be found at <http://www.blindscience.org/blindmath-gems-home>

_______________________________________________
BlindMath mailing list
BlindMath at nfbnet.org
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for BlindMath:
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/dana.mohsen.azim%40gmail.com
BlindMath Gems can be found at <http://www.blindscience.org/blindmath-gems-home>